An astonishing film opens this mesmerising exhibition. It shows a crowd of children in a parched and barren landscape at dusk, staring intently up at the sky. Above them swarm thousands of buzzing black dots. The children appear to mimic the sound, and even the movement, circling directly below.
Suddenly a boy snatches at the air; then another, and another. A fourth breaks away and claps his hands. The camera moves from their upturned faces to behold the almost imperceptible descent of one insect after another, in the sweltering twilight. This is the Democratic Republic of Congo, increasingly plagued by malaria, and these boys have found a sound pitched at a level that is irresistible to female mosquitoes, dragging them away from their mates. But this is also a daily game: who will cull most pests in this dance of flirtation and death?
Imbu, as it is known, is #30 in the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s tremendous video series Children’s Games, begun in 1999 and now approaching 50 in number. Each film is brief, enthralling to watch and beautifully observed. And each is so fascinating you immediately wish to see it again – true to the insatiable nature of games themselves – whereupon each recurs on continuous loop.
Slakken or snail racing in Belgium features brightly painted shells and encouraging children, but slackly wayward opponents. In Knucklebones, in Nepal, jacks is played with small stones by two girls sitting on a concrete step in the street as people’s legs and odd monkeys pass by.
In Hong Kong, a child in a blue pinafore jumps lightly between the bars of the zebra crossing and over those famously lethal pavement cracks. In Mexico, a whole village is playing the old game of tag. But instead of the tagged children being frozen to the spot, they are contaminated by a plague – Contagio – and now have to put on a red mask and become It. The last child standing shouts “Survivor!” The film was made after the first wave of Covid.
There are games of irreducible simplicity that allow for elaborate skill: competitive skipping, with double unders or continuous crossovers of the fraying rope. There are games of leapfrog where girls vie with boys for astuteness over brawn. There are games played with nothing more than pebbles and holes in the sand, their rules entirely inscrutable until you have watched twice. And all of this gleeful anticipation, this ingenious improvisation with dirt or twigs or windblown litter, is played out among tower blocks and refugee camps, as well as green fields, among the ruins of war as much as peace the world over.
Born in Belgium in 1959, resident in Mexico since 1986, Alÿs is one of the most humane and poetic artists at work today. Against widespread political grandstanding, his internationalism is infinitely subtle. He might not be able to affect the Arab-Israeli conflict in any way, for instance, but his 2004 walking of the exact route of Moshe Dayan’s notorious Green Line, as it divides Jerusalem, dribbling green paint as he went, became the physical embodiment of an impossible proposition. For the line can never hold, constantly smudged by time and human passage.
Children’s Games – invoking the eponymous 1560 painting of his compatriot Pieter Bruegel the Elder – offers a world without borders. Here are kites of junked plastic, skilfully marshalled in the free air by an Afghan boy in 2011 (under the Taliban, kite-flying has been banned). A film of boys skimming stones across the Gibraltar Straits from Tangier might seem geopolitical, until you yourself become seduced by the drama of each new ricochet (hence the show’s title). Tray sledging in Switzerland exactly resembles street racing in Havana, the cart made of any old wood, with ball-bearings for wheels. An exhilarating recklessness is matched by spectacular sound.
Alÿs has turned the gallery into a playground itself. Upstairs are his exquisite animations, chalk-white in darkened galleries like the Platonic ideal of games made from nothing: shadow-play, thumb wars, fingers taking a stroll. Two bare legs swing back and forth, on high, out of pure physical joy. There are playrooms for children, quizzical little stories of games looping around the banisters, and many of Alÿs’s own small paintings in unexpected places – cars exploding, small figures hopping (or is it running?), aeroplanes overhead. They show what we all can see, perhaps, but which adults cannot explain to children, who are at least protected by their innocence.
And like Bruegel’s masterpiece, Alÿs’s films are allegories for those who choose to see them. In Copenhagen, laughing children cooperate to manoeuvre an orange from forehead to forehead. In Kharkiv, in 2023, three boys play at checkpoints, flagging down passing soldiers to show their papers before merrily saluting. Their guns are made of wood, striped with yellow and blue duct tape. The secret password is the Ukrainian word for bread, which Russians cannot correctly pronounce.
And perhaps it is the same in Russia, were Alÿs to film there. Permutations of the same games thrive everywhere. A double-sided screen here has a film of a European conker game on one side and a Cuban variation on the other, played with tin lids that chime like small cymbals; games as the lingua franca of childhood.
Inventiveness, vitality, resourcefulness, joy, the power of resilience and solidarity, even just the willingness to watch and wait: everything on screen is experienced, to some degree, by the gallery visitor. Alÿs expands the universal game. Go if you can, and in these moments of pure absorption, leave the world behind and be liberated.
Until next spring, Tate Modern presents spectacular pleasures of another kind: a whole floor of the so-called Solid Light works of Anthony McCall, born in Britain in 1946, but long since based in New York. McCall has effectively decoupled cinema from image, marrying the glowing light with drawing. White beams stream across the museum’s darkened galleries in conical shafts, made visible with the haze of discreet machines. Some describe curvilinear forms on the walls, shifting and expanding in elegant ovals, suggestive of ribbons or eyes. Others roll like fog, enfolding you inside their mysterious dark corridors as you pass, somewhat nervously, through them.
Best of all is Face to Face, from 2013, where the evolving beams are projected in two directions at once with the use of a black mirror. The effect is both eerie and marvellously complex. You are here as a shadow, at first, then as a reflection, and finally as the kind of ghostly illusion known as Brocken spectre: a gigantic doppelganger that hovers on the mist before you and only leaves when you turn to face it, at which you both seem to dissolve in thin air.
Star ratings (out of five):
Francis Alÿs: Ricochets ★★★★★
Anthony McCall: Solid Light ★★★★
• Francis Alÿs: Ricochets is at the Barbican Arts Gallery, London until 1 September
• Anthony McCall: Solid Light is at Tate Modern, London until 27 April 2025
